The latest BugBrand Modular incarnation.

About Me

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I have been a keen experimenter in sound for 35 years having received my first tape machine aged 12. This led to experiments in field and binaural recording and various forms of sound editing and synthesis. I has composed for various gallery installations and lectured on synthesis. These days I can be found coaxing noises from my modular synthesisers just because it's fun. When not in my studio I prefer to be outdoors. To keep fit I play Airsoft and I'm field archer.

Wednesday 30 March 2011

Trying out a new VCO - Din Sync OSC303

The Din Dync OSC303 is a clone of the TB303 VCO. I wanted to try a patch that showed it's not just an Acid sound source.

Basically a sequence into a single VCO into a filter and that's it ;o)

LFO into RCD which clocks a 16 note sequence from the Z8000 and a uStep.
Z8000 out to uScale (default mode).
LFO to Brains/Pressure Points providing a 4 note sequence that feeds the second input of the uScale
uScale into OSC303
OSC303 Squ into Doepfer Spring Reverb into Z5000
OSC303 Saw into A101-1 filter into VCA
uStep into ADSR into VCA
VCS in cycle mode into A101-1 cutoff to create a resonance bump
A143-1 into Both input of VCS
VCA into Z5000
Z5000 set to a basic delay

Monday 21 March 2011

The Harvestman Piston Honda, expander, expander.

With so many ROMS starting to be made available for the Piston Honda I wanted a way to be able to swap them out without removing the module from the rack.

So inspired by a guy known as jbartee over at www.muffwiggler.com I knocked this up over the weekend.

 As you can see it's very simple, just two 16 way ZIF sockets cable up to the Piston Honda expansion board.


The main things to remember is to turn the power off before swapping ROMS and that the other ROMS within a socket are liable to fall out when you change one of them.

Monday 14 March 2011

Looking through my Archive

Well I started as planned and to be honest after 45 minutes with a boom box and a stack of tapes I now realise what a task this is going to be.

What was fun is that I had failed to mark the casettes as stereo or 4 track so on several occations the tape went in the machine and what came out was two seperate tracks, running at half speed and one of them backwards.


Some of it sounded good, the irony being that I'm halfway through reading "On some faraway beach" The life and times of Brian Eno by David Sheppard. Brian would be proud.

Friday 11 March 2011

An interesting new project

A friend and colleague of mine is a prose writer and recently I recorded myself reading one of his pieces.

Much to my surprise he has asked me to do a couple of more readings which I plan to do this weekend.

Looking to start going through the archive this weekend

Over the years I have used many medium for recording; mono reel to reel, stereo cassette, 4 track cassette, 4 track reel to reel and various digital formats.

So this weekend sees the start of what I expect will be a long process of converting it all to a common format.

This is a task I'm dreading because of the effort involved but equally really excited as I have no idea what little treasures I might find.

The challenge of sourcing something to play these tapes on will be fun too.

Monday 7 March 2011

First post

Hello everyone who have found their way to my place.

The idea is simple, a repository for things I'm doing that may or may not be of interest to others.